Trump’s Racism Is Feudal

The president wants African Americans to kiss his ring.

Donald Trump is mercurial even in his racism. A bigot but also a flibbertigibbet, Trump has a tendency to move rapidly from expressions of contempt for people of color to offering them overtures of solicitude. Over the weekend, Trump rage-tweeted against Congressman Elijah Cummings, who had the temerity to criticize the mistreatment of migrants. “Cumming [sic] District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump complained. “If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.” Trump added that that the district Cummings represented is “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there.” The language of “infestation” comes easily to Trump when talking about people of African descent, and the screed against Cummings echoed the recent go-back-to-where-you-came-from tirade against the Squad and earlier mudslinging aimed at Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

But in between lashing out against nonwhite lawmakers, Trump took up the cause of rapper A$AP Rocky, recently arrested in Sweden on an assault charge. Trump’s version of minority outreach is a byproduct of his friendship with Kanye West, who persuaded the president that A$AP Rocky’s arrest warranted a high-level diplomatic intervention. “Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States,” Trump tweeted last Thursday. “I watched the tapes of A$AP Rocky, and he was being followed and harassed by troublemakers. Treat Americans fairly!”

The contrast between Trump’s utter disdain for nonwhite lawmakers and his willingness to chastise an American ally on behalf of a jailed musician is partly traceable to the president’s special warmth for celebrities, especially if they praise him. It’s a bluntly personal response: If you criticize Trump, as Cummings and others have, you’re his enemy. If you are Trump’s pal, he’ll go the extra mile to help you out.

The priority Trump gives to transactional relationships gives some credence to Senator Lindsey Graham’s argument that the president is a narcissist rather than a racist.

But Graham’s formulation is too simple. It’s more accurate to say Trump’s racism and narcissism are both facets of his desire to rule like a feudal lord. If we see Trump as a would-be baron or an aspiring king, then his varied reaction to people of color makes sense: He loves those who pledge loyalty to him and hates those who defy him in any way.

Writing in the November/December issue of New Left Review, University of California sociologist Dylan Riley challenged the popular view, found across the political spectrum, that Trump is a fascist. Using the ideas of Max Weber, Riley argued that Trump was rather a practitioner of patrimonialism, the style of governance built on personal loyalty that was found in “the later Roman Empire and medieval Europe.”

It is patrimonialism that links Trump to oddball cronies like Wilbur Ross, Jared Kushner, Thomas Barrack, Stephen Miller, and Matthew Whitaker. As Riley observes, “Bonds of purely personal loyalty bind the seedy milieu of lumpen-millionaires (Ross and Kushner inside the Administration, Thomas Barrack outside) and hangers-on of various sorts (Miller, Whitaker) to Trump.” Patrimonialism also explains Trump’s use of the presidential pardon power on behalf of his political supporters such as Dinesh D’Souza, Conrad Black, and Joe Arpaio.

Structurally, the American presidency has always been an elected monarchy. But Trump has ruled more like a king than most presidents, transforming the traditional bonds of partisanship or ideology into relationships of personal fealty.

Trump’s essentially feudal conception of politics is surely traceable to his long-standing connections to the Mafia, perhaps the modern organization that most closely resembles the patrimonial governance of the premodern world. In the mob, the godfather is a de facto lord, who offers protection in exchange for respect and tribute.

Trump gained an intimate familiarity with the ways of the Mafia through his many years in the New York real estate world, where working with mobbed-up businesses is hard to avoid even for those who are more scrupulous than Trump. As journalist David Cay Johnston wrote in Politico in 2016, “Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with

  • top mobsters,
  • organized crime associates,
  • labor fixers,
  • corrupt union leaders,
  • con artists and even a one-time
  • drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.”

In a 2015 speech, Trump cited Mafia protection rackets as a good model for American foreign policy to use, arguing that the USA should exact tribute from allies like Germany and South Korea. “We defend the whole world,” Trump complained, adding there should be some reward for this service. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s like the Mafia defense.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, okay. The Mafia is not so stupid, all right.’”

Historians like Eugene Genovese have noted that the slave system depended heavily on paternalism, which might be called the natural ideology of feudalism. A poisoned paternalism remains the default ideology of American racism, the belief that black people are incapable of self-governance and need a strong hand to keep them in line.

While Trump tries to forge feudal relations with everyone, his domineering tendencies become particularly crude and nasty when he deals with African Americans. Trump can’t abide the idea of African Americans existing as citizens, with equal rights and the protection of the law rather than a strong man. Hence Trump’s heartfelt rage at any instance of black political expression that seeks to assert equality, whether it be the bending of the knee in protest by Colin Kaepernick or the rebukes of Elijah Cummings. Trump in fact wants a bent knee, but not on behalf of curbing police violence. Rather, genuflection must be in subservience of Trump.

With his recent tweet, Trump is trying to give African Americans an offer he thinks they can’t refuse. If they kiss his ring, they’ll come under his protection. If they defy him, he’ll unleash raw racist hatred against them.

Donald Trump Is Not a Sinister Genius

His race-baiting is impulsive and unpopular, not a brilliant strategy to win white votes.

Some columns spring from inspiration, some from diligent research. And some you’re prodded into writing because of what the other columnists are arguing about.

This is the third kind. With the Democratic debates in the spotlight, there has been a lot written on this op-ed page about the Democratic Party’s ideological evolution, its leftward march on many issues, and how this might help Donald Trump win re-election. Which in turn has prompted a recurring argument from certain of my liberal colleagues that anyone writing about the supposedly extremist Democrats should be writing about Trump’s extremism and unpopularity instead.

So this will be, as requested, a column about Trump’s extremism and unpopularity. But it’s not going to be a mirror image of the columns about the Democrats’ move leftward, because I don’t think policy substance matters as much to Trump’s prospects as it might to the party trying to unseat him.

It matters less because Trump in 2020 won’t be a change candidate. Instead, like every incumbent, he’ll be a candidate of the policy status quo — only much more so in his case, because his legislative agenda dissolved earlier than most presidents and the prospects for continued gridlock are obvious.

That means Trump probably won’t be campaigning on what he promised across 2016 — the kind of infrastructure-building, “worker’s party” conservatism whose ambitions vanished with Steve Bannon. But he also won’t be campaigning on the Paul Ryan agenda that the Republican Congress pushed in his first year, or reviving unpopular Ryan-era ideas like entitlement reform on the 2020 trail.

Instead Trump’s policy argument in 2020 will be, basically, let’s keep doing what we’re doing. That status quo includes a

  • deregulatory agenda,
  • a tariff push and a
  • harsh border policy that are all unpopular.

But it also includes:

  • free-spending budgets,
  • easy money and a more
  • anti-interventionist (for now) foreign policy than past Republicans, all of which are relatively popular.

And in the context of a strong economic expansion, a Trump re-election effort that rested on this record while warning against Democratic radicalism could be plausibly favored.

Except that this isn’t the kind of campaign that Trump himself wants to run. He wants the

  • racialized Twitter feuds, the
  • battles over Baltimore and Ilhan Omar, the
  • media freak-outs and the
  • “don’t call us racist!” defensiveness of his rallygoing fans.

He feeds on it, he loves it, and he’s as obviously bored by the prospect of a safe, status-quo campaign as he is obviously uninterested in the conservative intellectuals trying to transform Trumpism into something intellectually robust.

And here I agree with the left that there’s a media tendency to give Trump’s race-baiting impulses more credit as a strategy than they actually deserve. After each Twitter outburst his advisers try to retrofit a strategic vision, to claim there’s a master plan unfolding in which 2020 will become a referendum on Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes or the Baltimore crime rate. And the press gives them credence out of an imprinted-by-2016 fear that the president has a sinister sort of genius about what will help him win.

But this is paranoia, and the retrofitting is Trumpworld wishful thinking. There was, yes, a sinister genius at work when Trump used birtherism to build a primary-season constituency in 2016. But since then, his race-baiting has clearly contributed to his chronic unpopularity, and his re-election chances would almost certainly be far better if he talked like George W. Bush on race instead.

Second, in 2016 Trump won many millions of voters who disapproved of him. But in recent 2020 polling, Trump is performing below his job approval rating in many head-to-head matchups, which suggests that voters who would be responsive to the “policy status quo” argument keep getting turned off by the president’s rhetoric. The supposedly-brilliant strategy of racial polarization, then, is probably just a self-inflicted wound.

None of this means that Trump cannot be re-elected. But it means that if he wins again, it will likely be in spite of his own rhetoric, not as the dark fruit of a white-identitarian campaign.

In this sense both NeverTrump-conservative and liberal columnists can be right about the basic situation. The liberals are right that Trump is defiantly outside the mainstream — that every day, in a particular way, he proves himself extreme.

But this is a fixed reality for 2020, and the NeverTrump side is right about the variable: The campaign may turn on how successfully the Democrats claim or build an anti-Trump center, as opposed to appearing to offer an unpalatable extremism of their own.

Jared Kushner Makes Trump Look Like An Idiot

Trump forgot that his family is a bunch of slumlords. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. MORE TYT: https://tyt.com/trial

Read more here: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-critic… “Critics of President Donald Trump responded to his recent labeling of Elijah Cummings’ congressional district in Maryland as “disgusting” and “rodent infested” with photos of neighborhoods in Republican-controlled districts that also appeared to be rife with homelessness, poverty and waste.

Trump on Saturday railed against Cummings and Baltimore — about half of which falls in the congressman’s district — calling the city “disgusting rat and rodent infested.” Rather than decry or disavow the president’s remarks, Trump’s allies and conservative media outlets like Fox News attempted to bolster his claim by sharing photos and video of destitute and dirty portions of the Maryland metropolis. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday he’d have been “fired” from running his former South Carolina congressional district if it had as much crime and homelessness.

But Trump critics began pointing out these images were cherry-picked and failed to tell the whole story of Baltimore or the many suburban and rural communities included in Cummings’ district, they also posted pictures of their own of neighborhoods blighted by poverty and crime.

What’s more, these photos were reportedly taken in congressional districts and states controlled by staunch Republican Trump defenders, including Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Devin Nunes’ district in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Fresno.”

A Racist Stuck in the Past

In Trump’s mind, it’s still 1989.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. Yes, Donald Trump is a vile racist. He regularly uses dehumanizing language about nonwhites, including members of Congress. And while some argue that this is a cynical strategy designed to turn out Trump’s base, it is at most a strategy that builds on Trump’s pre-existing bigotry. He would be saying these things regardless (and was saying such things long before he ran for president); his team is simply trying to turn bigoted lemons into political lemonade.

What I haven’t seen pointed out much, however, is that Trump’s racism rests on a vision of America that is decades out of date. In his mind it’s always 1989. And that’s not an accident: The ways America has changed over the past three decades, both good and bad, are utterly inconsistent with Trump-style racism.

Why 1989? That was the year he demanded bringing back the death penalty in response to the case of the Central Park Five, black and Latino teenagers convicted of raping a white jogger in Central Park. They were, in fact, innocent; their convictions were vacated in 2002. Trump, nevertheless, has refused to apologize or admit that he was wrong.

His behavior then and later was vicious, and it is no excuse to acknowledge that at the time America was suffering from a crime wave. Still, there was indeed such a wave, and it was fairly common to talk about social collapse in inner-city urban communities.

But Trump doesn’t seem to be aware that times have changed. His vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today.

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was.

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans.

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

What this says to me is that the racists, and even those who claimed that there was some peculiar problem with black culture, were wrong, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right.

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for inner-city blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commentators hinted — or in some cases declared openly — that there was something about being nonwhite that predisposed people toward antisocial behavior.

What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more.

How might one test Wilson’s hypothesis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

I’m not saying that there’s something wrong or inferior about the inhabitants of, say, eastern Kentucky (and no American politician would dare suggest such a thing). On the contrary: What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

Which brings us back to Trump and his attack on Representative Elijah Cummings, whom he accused of representing a district that is a “mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Actually, part of the district is quite affluent and well educated, and in any case, Trump is debasing his office by, in effect, asserting that some Americans don’t deserve political representation.

But the real irony is that if you ask which congressional districts really are “messes” in the sense of suffering from severe social problems, many — probably most — strongly supported Trump in 2016. And Trump is, of course, doing nothing to help those districts. All he has to offer is hate.